As a new driver, I can tell you that safety is no joke. Driving 55 mph on the highway while operating a 2-ton-plus machine made of glass, plastic, and metal makes it dangerous not to remain focused and alert. This is even more dangerous when driving while impaired. Driving while impaired increases your risk of having an accident. At any moment, something can suddenly appear out of your blind spots, right in front of you, to sideswipe you. It will reduce your ability to react quickly to prevent an accident. Being impaired means that you are mentally or physically unfit to drive, thus causing you to be a hazard to everyone else on the road. It is often misunderstood by drivers who have not completed driver’s education or traffic school. There are different types of impairment. These can cause you to be unable to react to hazards on the road.  This is why driver's education and traffic school courses are needed. It helps change attitudes and behaviors. By showing how impairment can lead to accidents on the road, and by teaching new drivers why they shouldn't be impaired while driving. It can also teach you what role you can personally play when preventing accidents, which can save lives.

      Many new drivers don't realize that there are actually multiple types of impairment, and they don't realize how dangerous these impairments can be. Very often, they think that you can only be impaired by taking drugs and/or alcohol, causing them to think they can either continue to drive. They don't realize that texting while driving or driving when extremely tired can be used as hazardous. When it comes to drugs like marijuana and mushrooms, they can alter what you see, making it so that you can't tell what's actually on the road. Alcohol does the same and slows your reaction time down, making it more difficult to avoid hazards on the road. Texting on your phone impairs you by distracting your attention from the road, causing you to either cause an accident or become an unwilling participant in an ongoing accident. Another example is when a person was on their phone arguing with someone instead of watching the road, and because of this, they were unable to react to the situation in front of them. They didn't see the collision that had already happened in front of them and ended up causing them to become part of a multicar pile-up instead of being able to safely make it home. Being tired is a hazard all on its own because if you are tired, you won't be able to see/ react to any hazards in time. A good example of this is when I heard of a driver who was so tired that they accidentally fell asleep while driving behind the wheel and almost crashed into another vehicle collision. This could have been avoided if they had pulled to the side of the road, let another person drive or taken some much-needed rest before getting behind the wheel. This opened my eyes to the possibility that at any time, anything could happen on the road, and if I take my eyes off the road for even a second or allow any kind of distractions or impairments, I could potentially cause or get into an accident myself.

      Driver's education and traffic school courses teach us what to do in real-world situations and why driving while impaired is dangerous. You can also use the knowledge from what you learned to prevent accidents as well. Driver's education teaches you how to drive in a safe manner and what hazards you should look out for on the road, including when you yourself become one by being impaired. This is how you can use your education to help other drivers avoid accidents. Whenever you see another driver swerving on the road, you can honk at them to help them stay awake and to try to encourage them to get to a safe area to rest, and if you are in the same vehicle as the driver, you can try to shake them awake and encourage them to let you drive instead.

      In conclusion, driving impaired is a hazard to everyone who is on the road with you and can lead to accidents. Driver's education and traffic school courses make sure to teach new drivers that driving impaired is a hazard, and since this makes sure that new drivers are informed of these hazards, they can apply this in the real world to prevent other drivers from making the same mistakes and to help others avoid becoming accidents on the road.